An Interview with Greg Bear

Greg Bear is a science fiction and fantasy author who has published more than thirty books professionally. To date, he has won two Hugo Awards and five Nebula Awards for his fiction and is one of two authors to win a Nebula in every category. He has the singular honor of being married to Astrid Anderson Bear, whose father was the renowned science fiction author Poul Anderson. His most recent novel, Quantico, is a near-future examination of law enforcement, politics, and terror both domestic and religious. With each successive book that he completes, he continually earns his place among the greats, both contemporary and golden age, of the speculative fiction community.

Aberrant Dreams: You published your first professional story, The Destroyers, at sixteen. How do you think your views of science fiction have changed since that time?
Greg Bear: Actually, that story was accepted when I was fifteen and published when I was sixteen, so I had to wait a while. Back then, I loved many different kinds of imaginative fiction—science fiction, fantasy, and all of that. When I started writing, my first novel was actually a surrealistic literary fantasy. I was finding my range, and at almost the same time, I was working on a hard science fiction novel. I was trying to see how far I could stretch. My models were writers like Poul Anderson who could write both science fiction and fantasy superbly.

Even then, I was aware that fantasy was going to be more popular than science fiction, but I thought I should put a stronger focus on my science fiction. So, I went off in that direction and published more science fiction than fantasy. I recall that back when I was thinking about Eon and Blood Music, I was also writing the sequel to The Infinity Concerto, The Serpent Mage.

Aberrant Dreams: I really liked the whole presentation of The Serpent Mage and The Infinity Concerto—the way the book was published, the illustrations on front, and how it was split into the two volumes. These were the British editions, I think.
Greg Bear: Yeah ,those two novels were published in the eighties, in some nice hard cover editions.

Aberrant Dreams: Speaking of hard covers, I am an Arkham House collector. As you know, if you did not get a copy of The Wind from a Burning Woman early on, it was going to cost $75.00 to $100.00.
Greg Bear: It sold out quickly. I think it was a bit of a surprise even for Jim Turner that Wind sold out its first printing in a little more than three months. It was the fastest selling book in Arkham House history.

Aberrant Dreams: My good friend, and actual neighbor here, is Michael Bishop, and…
Greg Bear: Yeah, his book was the one that came out first. Mine was scheduled, but Jim Turner spoke with him to get permission to use my book’s title, which was a line from one of his poems. Michael had a collection ready to go, and they set it up. I think Blooded on Arachne was the first of Jim’s science fiction titles for Arkham House.

Aberrant Dreams: Did you title the story knowing that Bishop had written a poem with that line in it (The Wind from a Burning Woman)?
Greg Bear: Oh yeah, I had read the poem, and I thought it was quite wonderful. His line made a perfect title, so I corresponded with Michael, and he agreed to let me use it.

Aberrant Dreams: Do you have a complete set of Arkham House books?
Greg Bear: No, there are quite a few that I am missing. I focus on a number of the authors and pick up other volumes when I see them--at a reasonable price, which is rare these days! Of course, I started buying Arkham House books in the 1960s to read them, so completing the collection has never been my goal.

Aberrant Dreams: Someone mentioned on a panel at a convention one time how advantageous a position you were in having Poul Anderson as a father-in-law.
Greg Bear: Well, it was certainly fun. He was one of my favorite writers, and to be able to talk to him on frequent occasions has been a great pleasure to me.

Aberrant Dreams: Is there any of your work which he had a particularly strong impact on?
Greg Bear: I think of Tau Zero, or The Broken Sword, had the greatest impact on me. If you look at my elves in The Infinity Concerto, the Sidhe are modeled after Poul’s elves. They’re a little grimmer than most.

Taking Poul’s advice on novels like Eon and The Forge of God was certainly useful. We sat down for both of those and figured out orbits and such. Poul, of course, was an expert of fictionalizing orbital mechanics and making it sound very convincing, so I tapped in for that expertise.

Aberrant Dreams: Speaking of Eon and Hegira and something they both had in common, they both faintly reminisce Symmes’ theory and are also an extrapolation on the old hollow earth concept.
Greg Bear: There is an aspect of that, isn’t there--hollow asteroid, hollow Earth? The more I read about asteroids today, the more I doubt we could actually hollow one out. They might just be bundles of aggregate rocks, so it would be difficult to do. Beyond that, I don’t think I’ve been influenced too much by Hollow Earth theories, although there is a lovely book I would like to get a copy of some day called Etidorhpa by John Uri Lloyd--Aphrodite spelled backwards. I first read it in a antiquarian book store where I was working, and I found it off-the-wall and weirdly brilliant

Aberrant Dreams: Michael Levy, the past president of the Science Fiction Research Association, likens in his commentaries of some of your works, specifically TheForge of God and Anvil of Stars, to that of the late Edmond Hamilton. Is that a fair comparison?
Greg Bear: Well, I have had a tendency to blow up worlds. Ed Hamilton got a reputation for that, but he wasn’t alone--Doc Smith did his share of planet-busting, too.

When I wrote The Forge of God, it was my goal to go Star Wars and one better and show how long it would take for a planet to actually blow up, and how heart rending it would be. Of course, that movie was not designed to have you break down in tears, but, if you are going to loose an entire planet, Princess Leia is going to loose a lot more than her record collection.

Aberrant Dreams: If I had to pick my favorite Greg Bear novel, it would have to be Anvil of Stars, particularly the rope aliens and the great journey through space—there are so many really neat things going on in that novel. I was sort of surprised that it isn’t as well known as Eon, your Darwin stuff, and The Forge of God.
Greg Bear: I think Eon is probably my biggest selling book to date, but Anvil of Stars has its own coterie. The two books, The Forge of God and Anvil of Stars, are going to be republished and repackaged soon by Tor Books, and it will be good to have them back in print together, at the same publisher. Anvil has been kind of hard to find in the past few years.

Aberrant Dreams: My son and I read Dinosaur Summer together when he was a teenager. With the final scene where the giant eagle dinosaur creature enters, I looked over at my son and said, “You know there is going to be a sequel to this, and we’re going to wait and get it.” I have since forgiven you for that one.
Greg Bear: Well, there was unfortunately no sequel for Dinosaur Summer. The book didn’t sell that well for Warner Books, and they weren’t too interested in doing another one. They did a lovely job on the hard cover for that book with the color plates, so I am still really proud of that one. They were not quite sure how to market it. To this day, I still don’t think they know, so we’ve gotten it back, and we’ll be trying to find another publisher for it again soon.

Aberrant Dreams: You are also one of the few writers that come to mind, having written in both the Star Trek and the Star Wars universes. At every science fiction convention, there is always a panel about Star Wars verses Star Trek. If you found yourself on that panel, for which side would you bat?
Greg Bear: Well, there wouldn’t have been a Star Wars without a Star Trek. I’m sure even George Lucas would admit that. If you go back to the lineage of interstellar travel and space opera, you’ll find two sides of the equation.

I think Star Trek adheres to the more seriously extrapolated side, despite some of the sillier episodes. It was more of a universe you could imagine yourself living in with fewer fantasy elements.

Star Wars came along and mixes in so many different elements. There are pulp films, samurai movies, Arthurian legend, and science fiction, and it’s all planted in a thoroughly convincing science fiction designed universe. It was a flavor that no one had quite seen before, and it was also done with tremendous conviction and love. At that time, Star Wars became a kind of crossover bridge for science fiction and fantasy. I think is still is to this day, while Star Trek and science fiction are more closely aligned. Its universe is a little more convincing.

Ultimately, it depends on your feeling of the moment. If you want rip-roaring action and that sort of thing, I still like Star Wars. I’ve been a Star Wars fan ever since 1977. I don’t follow all of the novels and all of the off-shoots—it would take a lifetime at this point. I certainly haven’t done that with the Star Trek novels, either, and I’m not even that familiar with the more recent Star Trek series.

That’s the difference between today and when I was getting started in 1965 or 1966. Today, you cannot avoid science fiction and fantasy. What I find interesting is that while New York is currently kind of shutting down its science fiction operations and focusing more on fantasy, especially literary fantasy, Hollywood is still very much enamored with science fiction. So, the west coast loves science fiction and the east coast tends to go with fantasy.

Aberrant Dreams: I got to attend one of your Killer Bees tours, and I missed where you talked about how that came about. Would you mind recapping that for us?
Greg Bears: Gregory Benford I think got that started. He talked to the Asimov estate about doing a Foundation book and then he talked to David and me. He got us thinking about it, and by the time a publisher’s deal came along, we were enthused. Harper picked up on a new trilogy, and we wrote our books separately. Gregory finished his first, and having read it, I sat down and wrote mine, and integrated some of his ideas and themes. I think David was planning his all along. There wasn’t a lot of crossover between the plots in the books--other than those points provided by the Good Doctor--but they integrate fairly well. Gregory was the pattern master in the beginning.

Aberrant Dreams: Maybe you could rekindle a reunion and look at the history of civilization.
Greg Bear: You mean do a Doc Smith? We could, couldn’t we? It’s interesting how Asimov and Smith and Star Wars kind of fit together in some respects. I’ve often thought that you could take the Dune universe and the Star Wars universe and plant them in corners of Asimov’s. With that empire and a quadrillion people in it, you could cover a lot of history without ever being noticed by Trantor and the bureaucracy of galactic operations.

Aberrant Dreams: Who would you most like to co-author with, living or dead, and why?
Greg Bear: I really haven’t done that. My way of writing so far has been pretty much as a loner. I would have loved to collaborate with Poul Anderson. There are a lot of writers that I think I could do good work with, but I might be a little too lazy to put the work in to collaborate with another person. You know the rule about that? In a collaboration, each person does three quarters of the work.

Aberrant Dreams: Tell us a little something about Quantico and your delving into a sort of mystery and with Islam verses the west. What is this novel all about?
Greg Bear: I got this novel planted in my head when I gave a talk at the FBI academy back in 2000. I was planning Darwin’s Children at that point, but the notion of doing science fiction suspense novels has always intrigued me. I remember back in the days of yore when Analog was publishing stuff by Joe Poyer and Mack Reynolds, but my thoughts crossed over into what today would be called techno-thrillers. I’ve always considered them a branch of science fiction.

Rather than looking forty, fifty, or sixty years down the road, I decided to bring the future almost down to the wire and wrote a book set ten to twelve year from today, where we continue to have a regime that does not seem to understand the Middle East, and the Middle East is still mired in insanity, and the mess has just gotten worse. What happens to us under those circumstances? How does it impact the people we put on the front line?

That was my chief interest. We’ve got a lot of people who are very dedicated, hard working, and willing to sacrifice their lives for this country. What happens when we misuse, misguide, and mistreat them--to us as a country, to their families? What happens if incompetent civilian rule does them a severe injustice? You’re not going to hear it from them. They’re pretty dedicated--certainly faithful to the commitment of serving their country.

I decided to take a realistic look at what it is like to live in a world where the leadership is basically crazy. Well, at least inept and ignorant of how to handle things of this complexity. Actually, that has been true of the Middle East for centuries now. We simply do not know how to solve the problems that come out of the Middle East.

Aberrant Dreams: It’s all ready available over here, isn’t it?
Greg Bear: It’s available in the UK from HarperCollons. A U.S. trade edition will be published this spring, with substantial promotion, by a new publisher, Vanguard Press. And it’s currently available from a number of book clubs, including The Book of the Month Club, Mystery Guild, and The Science Fiction Book Club. It should be fairly easy to find.

Aberrant Dreams: It is quite a journey to have come from the cover of H. G. Wells: Critic of Progress to be one of the world’s major science fiction writers. Ideologically, when comparing Wells’ views to modern transhumanism, do you feel good about where we have gone and where we are going to go?
Greg Bear: I think I remain an optimist despite our near-term problems, because we’ve been through much worse. If we hark back to World War II and the many atrocities of the twentieth century, the past seens a lot worse than what we are experiencing now, but every crisis seems to stand out in our lives. So, yes, I remain an optimist.

As for transhumanism and H. G. Wells, I think Mr. Wells might have had some things to say about transhumanism. We’ve got a lot of problems to solve before we figure out what it means to be more than human, because we don’t know what it means to be human yet. That doesn’t mean we should not be thinking about it and doing the research to enhance our experiences of living, thinking, and so on. But we should be humble and cautious.

My approach to transhumanism is cautionary, especially when it comes to possibilities like biological immortality—or even greatly extending longevity. That is a problematic thing for me. The metaphor I have always made--and used explicitly at in Vital-- is that this is what cancer cells do. I’m having a hard time convincing many devoted transhumanists about this. They really do want to live forever and journey to the end of time, but there have to be certain restrictions put upon them if this is to ever work.

I suggest that people also take a look at Joe Haldeman’s book, Buying Time (I think the British version was The Long Habit of Living). I think that is an excellent lesson about longevity. I also suggest that we take a look at The Boat of a Million Years, by Poul Anderson, which follows on from Heinlein’s approach to longevity. This is another excellent novel.

I am sure if Mr. Wells were here, we could raise these issues and provoke a rousing good debate.

Aberrant Dreams: Well said. While you were talking about that, to me, you left Heads very open at the end. In my mind, for right or for wrong, I was picturing L. Ron Hubbard. Was that who you meant with that title?
Greg Bear: Following up from Heads was Moving Mars. If you want to find out a little more about the history, you can take a look at Moving Mars. As for who was buried in the pit, we’ll never know now because it was subsumed in what later became known as a Bose-Einstein Condensate, after the book was published. Before I became familiar with what that was, in the mid-nineties, Heads was published. I don’t know whether I actually anticipated that weird state of quantum fluctuation.

Aberrant Dreams: Earlier in the interview, I mentioned Edmond Hamilton. I found on the internet, an upcoming novel of yours with a title very similar to his The City at World’s End.
Greg Bear: Right…or how about Harlan’s City at the Edge of Forever.

Aberrant Dreams: Are there ties there or is this all coincidental?
Greg Bear: No, we all like to borrow titles from each other, and in this case, my novel is literally about a city at the end of time—the last city on Earth, the last human citadel in the universe. I’m kind of fluctuating between Arthur C. Clarke and William Hope Hodgson here. Parts of it are set in contemporary Seattle, and parts are set one hundred trillion years in the future. Now mind you, I think one hundred trillion years is more than I care to write about in one book, and it’s a real challenge to write about such a very distant future--almost incomprehensibly far away. In fact, it is incomprehensibly far away. I’ll be frequently invoking Sir Arthur’s law that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That brings up the question that if the book stretches our boundaries, such that it feels almost like fantasy, is it still science fiction? That’s a good question for novels like The City and the Stars, too.

Aberrant Dreams: You alluded to William Hope Hodgson, of whom I am a tremendous fan. Are you talking about The House on the Borderland?
Greg Bear: No, The Night Land.

Aberrant Dreams: Do you have a copy of that one in your collection?
Greg Bear: Yes, I do have the Arkham House edition. There is also a new set from Nightshade that is quite lovely—four volumes of Hodgson. I think they are going to do a fifth, and that will be almost everything Hodgson ever did. Also, Jane Frank wrote an introduction to a collection of Hodgson’s papers, which apparently the Franks own. Two volumes edited by her were published by Tartarus Press.

Aberrant Dreams: Do you still get as much satisfaction out of writing short fiction as you did early on?
Greg Bear: I’d like to have more time to write short stories, but at this point I haven’t written one in quite some time. The last piece I wrote is coming out from David Hartwell’s Year’s Best SF 11 anthology. It is a book review written by a robot, about a noir mystery novel written by a robot, and I wrote it for a small magazine published by Facere, a local art jewelry store. The story was picked up by Nature Magazine, of all things, and now David Hartwell will be reprinting it.

Aberrant Dreams: Lastly, is there anything else you would like to add?
Greg Bear: I think we covered a lot of territory here, and I appreciate it.

Aberrant Dreams: We really appreciate the opportunity for this interview, and we look forward to seeing The City at the End of Time. When do you think it will be out?
Greg Bear: Possibly next year, but I’m not sure. It depends on when I get finished and hand it in. It’s about two-thirds done in rough draft, right now.

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